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ORAL HISTORY OF JEAN COLE
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
April 30, 2004
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Jean, tell us first how and why you and your husband, Tom, came to Oak Ridge in '46. Right?
Mrs. Cole: Tom had been in the Navy and was discharged from the Navy after World War II, and he went back to college at Rollins and after he graduated he came up the corridor here to Chicago to interview with the, a company that one of my cousin’s father owned, and when he got there he then came back through and he had a good interview, and he came back through. What he didn’t know was Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was not aware of it at all. And he said well, what goes on here, and somebody said well there’s a new laboratory and so forth and it's been working here during World War II, which of course he wouldn’t have known. So I think the first person that he met at the laboratory who interviewed him was Ernie Walland, yeah, it was a very nice interview and he got a job here and he decided I don’t want to go there. So that’s why we came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Did he involve you in the decision about working here?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes, we were on the telephone together and I was in Winter Park at the time. My family are from Poughkeepsie, New York and Connecticut. And so I had a little baby at that point, little Hank Cole, and we came up here with a car full of baby things and so forth, which my Navy man was not very used to at that point, a lot of Navy people instead.
Mr. Kolb: And that was in what time?
Mrs. Cole: So that would be 1946.
Mr. Kolb: About what month, do you have any idea, roughly?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, it was, well, it was, it was still warm weather so I think it was actually quite hot.
Mr. Kolb: In the summer probably.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. I think, I don’t remember exactly so I can’t tell you.
Mr. Kolb: So the town was still a closed town.
Mrs. Cole: It was still a closed town.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get the badge, have badges?
Mrs. Cole: And he had to meet me at the gate in order for me to come in and then he, I don’t know why this happened, but it seems to me we were in one car, so I must not have driven, I must have come by train, and then he must have picked me up with Hank at the train.
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville?
Mrs. Cole: In Knoxville. And so then he drove me all around here and he kept saying well see, look, we're burning coal here and these little houses where everybody’s living in, and I said, “Oh, okay, that’s fine.” And he was on the west side of town where they were just tons of these little, what did you call them at that time?
Mr. Kolb: Flattops?
Mrs. Cole: Flattops.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh there were tons of them and lots of coal burning bins outside, and the smell was incredible, you know, and I had been in South Africa with my, later on I had been in South Africa and when I was there the smell of coal was everywhere, which I hadn't expected.
Mr. Kolb: The sulfur coal, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. And of course when we came to our, he took me the long way around and he said see aren’t these great, and I said oh sure they’re fine. And so, then, he was just kidding, you know, and when he came here I just didn't know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you thought you were going to wind up in one of those.
Mrs. Cole: Well, yeah, I thought that, you know, I was going to have a husband again after all these years to me and a little baby. So we came to Diston Road and-
Mr. Kolb: To this house?
Mrs. Cole: We were in the little B-house right next door, and that was all we were allowed because at that time the Manhattan, then it wasn't, it was called Roane Anderson at that time, said that you could not have a house unless, if you had one baby or two, you could have a two bedroom house but that was all.
Mr. Kolb: So you got a B?
Mrs. Cole: So we had a B-house, which was charming, and I was just, and of course we found, I found out that it was full of coal smoke very quickly when it got cold weather, and I think my husband lost his temper many times over the explosion of having put too much coal in the stove and I had ordered pink rugs.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, boy, the soot.
Mrs. Cole: So we had, we had lots of cleaning to do. Anyway, but I loved it and we were right next door to Elizabeth and St. George Tucker Arnold.
Mr. Kolb: Where they in this house?
Mrs. Cole: They were in the house next door, on the other side. One-oh, we were, this is 103, and that's 101 and 105. And so Elizabeth and St. George had two little children, one was, Tucker was Hank’s age or so and became a wonderful friendship, like family, I guess when my mother and father both died in this house later on and I really had no family here and they were like family and I don’t remember. In fact, their children are still my family, and Hank keeps us with Tucker and Liz, one in, one in California and one in Florida. So to make a long story short that is where we landed with this little boy.
Mr. Kolb: And what was Oak Ridge like in terms of, were the streets paved by then, for example?
Mrs. Cole: Yes they were and we had some sidewalks, we had this, no, I can remember when they changed the elevation of the street and we, instead of being on the street level we were below the street level and we had to have stairs to go to the house, so that, and I think there about seven steps to get down here and then we had this wonderful positioning. This is not at the B-house. At the B-house, it was very simple to get in and I think we had wonderful neighbors. The neighborhood had more than forty children on the road here between the top and the bottom and that was typically Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was full of children.
Mrs. Cole: Because we were all, now as elder people, as grandparents now, we all had a lot of children.
Mr. Kolb: And your kids went to what school, then?
Mrs. Cole: We went to Elm Grove.
Mr. Kolb: Elm Grove, out on Tennessee, right? And they all went there I presume.
Mrs. Cole: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you didn’t work, but Tom worked, I mean, but you got very active in-
Mrs. Cole: Right, he was at the laboratory, right.
Mr. Kolb: Now you got very, but, let’s see, the rationing was over by then, I guess, you didn’t have to stand in line.
Mrs. Cole: No we were not, and Tom just couldn’t understand it because in the Navy you could have real butter. Well that’s another story.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but that’s true, but then that’s the thing about early Oak Ridge. Okay, so you got very involved in the arts community here in Oak Ridge. Tell us how that started. Or was that later on? I don’t know exactly when that happened.
Mrs. Cole: Well, actually I was part of the first Art Center that was located up on Outer Drive here at what used to be a store and a drug store and various things and then-
Mr. Kolb: It's still there.
Mrs. Cole: it’s still there and then when they left, there was a room that was vacated, because it was partitioned off, and that’s where the first meeting of the Art Center started.
Mr. Kolb: Now let me back up. Had you done pottery already at that time?
Mrs. Cole: Not at all. No, I was a painter. I took, when I was in France as a little girl, lived there for a year, I took drawing and painting lessons. That was part of the school curriculum and I had always drawn and liked art.
Mr. Kolb: You had an interest in art.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, always, I never thought of pottery except that I loved seeing a man do it up in New York State a little bit.
Mr. Kolb: So who else was involved in the Art Center early on?
Mrs. Cole: Well, Miriam Kohler was one of them, who, and Wylie Kohler was at the lab, and they were part of it. I don’t remember a lot of the people. Shortly thereafter, two very wonderful people who came to Oak Ridge from Norris were the Eplers, E. P. Eppler and Elizabeth, beautiful artist as well. I wish I had one of her paintings. And they became our, I guess, our number two family, Tom took me up to see them one day and E. P. was raising strawberries and he insisted that I go back home and get a bigger basket cause I had, I just brought a little one, you know, didn't want to, anyway. So typical, little things like that made life so wonderful and children and families and lots of, the Peterson’s had four children in one house and the Milner’s had two across the street and the Arnold’s had two and it was just a wonderful time. The London’s came very shortly.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they still there?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, Mike and-
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Mike London?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I worked for Mike, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: His picture was just in the paper the other day.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was a tax service, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh my, he loves doing it too.
Mr. Kolb: But then was Jane, was it Jenny Larson, was she involved then, Mrs. Larson?
Mrs. Cole: In the art, oh she certainly was. She did the part of the Art Center that was the Pottery Department, and also she helped locate the original building which is still there, the Art Center, where it is, and got permission from the city, we're city, at least, the land the city owned.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Cole: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: Ok, I didn’t know that, I see.
Mrs. Cole: It has a lot to do with what we can do to the Art Center.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, that's true, and be non-taxable, while your, it's a good situation.
Mrs. Cole: But that, that is my art background that started then, and it was very small because I had a lot of other things I was doing.
Mr. Kolb: Like what?
Mrs. Cole: Oh, well, with children you always have a lot of things. If you have little boys, they’re all going to be cubs scouts if that’s what they’ve chosen, and guess what you had to be the cub scout mother.
Mr. Kolb: Den mother, yeah, right, okay, take your turn, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: That's right, and so this back yard was full of children doing all kinds of things and lots of costumes coming from it, lots of play acting, lots of hiking and going in the woods and finding-
Mr. Kolb: Critters, whatever.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, critters and wildflowers. Salamanders used to be in this little stream down here.
Mr. Kolb: Now were the boardwalks to the schools still-
Mrs. Cole: There were some old ones still here and playground, there was a playground right up on this hill here. They had them all over town. Actually, it was metal bar with a swing and a, and when we came there was slide and some kind of a rope thing, it wasn’t a very big thing.
Mr. Kolb: But it wasn’t part of the school ground it was separate.
Mrs. Cole: No it was in all the communities. But see, well, there was 75,000 people here. So by the time we came it was reduced, I guess, to about 42,000, something like that, I don't know the statistics. So art we were talking about.
Mr. Kolb: Right, so the Art Center was just being formed and you got on the board, I believe, some time back in then.
Mrs. Cole: Oh I’ve forgotten what I did, but I think the main thing was that I found out that I was very interested in art and wanted to continue that, but it wasn’t a big deal because I did other things as well, and I think what made me the most interested was working with Buck Ewing and about ten different artists doing painting for about 10 years.
Mr. Kolb: The UT Professor?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, he was called Buck. Yes, Buck Ewing and Elizabeth Eppler was one of the people, Mary Gomez was one of the people. It was a wonderful art class, and we met for about ten years.
Mr. Kolb: Did you go to Knoxville for those classes.
Mrs. Cole: No, Buck came out here to the Art Center and I think one of the fun things at the end of this, we were, and I don’t think it could happen, it’s a woodpecker going on out there, he loves that tree, and the Art Center, Buck said, well we’re going to have an exhibit, and we said, "What?" And he said we’re going to be exhibited in the library at UT, so that’s what we were. And I don’t think that could happen today. But Mary Gomez was quite an interesting painter and Elizabeth Eppler was, and I happened to be in that class too. Lee, I trying to think of her last name, Lee, I have one of her paintings. It's called “Looking through the keyhole in Oak Ridge.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, "Looking through the Keyhole," I have to see that later. So you had a really wonderful, well you know, that’s the thing about Tennessee it’s sort of thought of as being backward but there is a lot of culture here through Knoxville and the people that were here.
Mrs. Cole: Well I think the most important thing that happened in my life was that we had, when the colored people, the black people were going through that terrible time of shooting and Edgar, Edgars, and all that that happened, and I was very much involved in that, as were many of my friends, and I didn’t know the difference, I’d lived in Florida where we had black people all the time at our house and my father was a contractor and used them and I never thought of them as black.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, of course, they still were segregated then.
Mrs. Cole: That’s true but-
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t go to your schools and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Cole: That’s right and we worked for that, my mother did, so I wasn’t coming to this by myself but we had wonderful friends and some that worked for me and I, actually, the Griffin family over in Oliver Springs is a wonderful black family and they were, most people knew them in Oliver Springs at the time, and they were probably the leaders of black thought for what was needed for them to become nonsegregated, and they didn’t think of it that way but many of us white people were their friends and I got to know them very well, in fact I just went to a funeral there the other day and got warmly hugged which was sweet. I really knew them very well and the woman whose husband worked for me, she worked for me and then I, well everybody that I knew wanted to help them get into better jobs. We thought as servants in a house or a maid or just a day cleaner it was important for them because they were smart and they didn’t need to be doing those things, so whenever we could we did one more thing to give them more chance for a better education and a better job and that’s what happened to Sanretta, who worked for me, and she ended up working in accounting and as I said, they were all smart. And then her husband came and worked for us from time to time, we built a basement in the meantime here and he just, he loved doing that and did several others and doors became places where they, the family who were doing it hadn’t planned on, cause he just decided this was a good place to put the door. Anyway, but we never complained, but my thought about him was that he was a lovely, lovely man, and he was semi-minister, whatever you call that, you know they weren’t trained, but his little boy was the first one that was taken to the Clinton school after all the riots, and Sanretta was at my house when that happened, and I had to hug her the whole time because she was so afraid that they might get shot, but they made it. So that was part of what was really a part of my life for quite a time.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that was in the later '50s, wasn't it?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: When the desegregation movement came through and Oak Ridge became desegregated first in Tennessee, yeah, yeah, it was a tense time but, you know, it was, it was important, had to happen sooner or later, it just took a long time. So you had these contacts with the black community or the Afro-American Community.
Mrs. Cole: Oh yeah and they’re still part of my family.
Mr. Kolb: You say the name Griffin?
Mrs. Cole: Griffin family.
Mr. Kolb: Are there still some in Oliver Springs?
Mrs. Cole: Mhm, as I said, I just went to the service of Kathleen and it was just like being home with those people they all came up and gave me a hug because we were like family, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, my wife had the same experience. She comes from Kentucky. They had, you know, black servants there, workers, but they treated them just like family, like you said.
Mrs. Cole: I have to give my mother a lot of credit for this because in Penn School was located right on the, I’m trying to think what, it’s on the coast, and it's on a, you can only get to it by boat, the ferry boat, and there was a school there called Penn School and my family in Poughkeepsie, New York helped finance that, my grandmother did, and then my mother, and one time my father and mother on their way to Florida where we lived for ten years stopped by there and I've never had such an experience because, you know, we were sort of embarrassed, they sat us in the front seats and they introduced us, you know, all that sort of thing and that was not what it was about, it was just to see the school and how they were teaching the youngsters and there was a book written about that school.
Mr. Kolb: This is a school for Afro-Americans?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, which is kind of unique, okay.
Mrs. Cole: And it was financed by people like those in the Presbyterian Church that my family were involved in. Wonderful experience so you just didn’t have any feeling except they are our people, you know, their people if they wanted to be. Freedom is the most important thing.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah. Opportunity, yeah. Well that’s interesting, you know I was raised in Wisconsin where black people didn’t exist, I mean I never saw a black person until I went to my two cousins in Chicago, Illinois where there were blacks there a lot but I never saw them in my hometown, there wasn’t anybody.
Mrs. Cole: Did you know Audie Curtis? She said the same thing. She was from Wisconsin, yeah, very different.
Mr. Kolb: Later on you got exposed. Okay, well, well tell us about, about Oak Ridge when it started changing from being a government run city by Roane Anderson and the first city council and how the city formed its first government and the changes when people had to take responsibility, in other words, for, for their finances and all that kind of thing, was that, that would be, that would be like, I guess, in the what, '50s? When, I forget when they first-
Mrs. Cole: I don’t have the date in my mind.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was early, sometime in the '50s and it was quite controversial.
Mrs. Cole: I thought it was sooner than that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, maybe so. Actually when the gates opened in '49 there was a referendum, right? Do you remember that?
Mrs. Cole: Yes I do and I was going to tell you I was there when the gates came down, you know, as it were, so we didn’t have people-
Mr. Kolb: But leading up to that they took a vote about whether they should open the gates or not?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: What happened about that?
Mrs. Cole: Well all I remember is that we won.
Mr. Kolb: But I understand the first vote was to not open the gates.
Mrs. Cole: Well I don’t remember that, 'cause I only voted, you know, I didn’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember that day when, were you here when the gates, when they had the big celebration.
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes and I think I took, I’m trying to think, one child was born in '44 and the other one in '48.
Mr. Kolb: So you had two children then, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Right, so I had little Ted at that point, yeah, so, but I do remember it vividly and it was quite a, you know, huzzah day.
Mr. Kolb: Celebration, big parade and all the Hollywood types were here. Marie McDonald was here as I recall.
Mrs. Cole: Oh I don’t remember we had a lot of, Margaret Mead was the one that always comes to my mind because she was here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh she was here during, during that day?
Mrs. Cole: No, no, but later on, the famous people department.
Mr. Kolb: Well tell me about Margaret Mead then.
Mrs. Cole: Well she was very controversial when she came here and I didn’t think of her that way I was quite surprised at the reception that was kind of divided really about her. But it was her, it had to do with a remark that she made, you know how things come out in the paper, and it had to do with a remark that she made about, sorry I can’t quote it right now.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, just the gist of it.
Mrs. Cole: But what she was, what she did, what she felt about Oak Ridge was not what Oak Ridge was and she was quite caustic about it in her remark, that’s all I’ll say and so people pounced on it and then she had to backtrack a bit.
Mr. Kolb: She had a preconceived idea about the education of Oak Ridgers?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, and she wasn’t listening well, yes, I think she thought we weren’t, you know, you know what her book was about.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, well, I think she was thinking of Oak Ridge not living up to that kind of thing that she had done in her book, and that we were ostracizing or making little of some people who were, should be have, it should have been inclusive, I’ll put it that way.
Mr. Kolb: More inclusive.
Mrs. Cole: And it was, it was, it was quite interesting that she took that impression of Oak Ridge which was really continually reaching out. I always think of Oak Ridge as a reaching out community, and in a sense we didn’t very much to Knoxville at all. We were more involved in people around the county and different counties around us.
Mr. Kolb: Right, the rural area more.
Mrs. Cole: But I’m not sure how many people were involved, because I was so involved in it, so, you know, when you get into that, especially because of Planned Parenthood.
Mr. Kolb: Well speaking of involvement, what, what about Knoxville per se? Did you have any good or bad relations of shopping there and that kind of-
Mrs. Cole: Well, I played tennis at that time, so I got to know a few Knoxvillians and I loved tennis and that was, we had the free courts here and you could just go down and play with your friends, so I enjoyed doing that, and I got to know a few of the Sterkee family and so forth in Knoxville, and they, I think, I can’t remember, but I think they ended up in Florida, the ones I knew best.
Mr. Kolb: This is furniture company, Sterkee Furniture?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, but there’s the younger generation and they moved to Florida and I did see them a couple of times there. I think her husband died in the house where she lived.
Mr. Kolb: But some people have said that some of the merchants sort of looked down their noses at Oak Ridgers or they thought they were, Oak Ridgers were, thought they were too good for Knoxville, and they didn't accept, they liked our money but they, they thought-
Mrs. Cole: I think we felt a little ostracized, I don't know if that’s a good word.
Mr. Kolb: Did you feel that?
Mrs. Cole: I think we felt that, I’m not sure it was true because I never paid much attention to it. It was more talk of somebody, and, oh, I don’t know, I guess so, I don't know.
Mr. Kolb: So you never had any bad experiences yourself?
Mrs. Cole: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, but there was talk like that, that’s what I’ve heard.
Mrs. Cole: Well we had a very good department store there for one thing, Miller’s and then what was the other one?
Mr. Kolb: In Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cole: No in Knoxville, and actually Miller’s came here, didn't they.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and Loveman’s, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: So there were a lot of reasons to do some shopping there. But the people that I knew were very, very nice they all seemed to be quite wealthy which is what we were not, and I was kind of, and that happened maybe because of going to clubs with tennis or something like that, but lovely people, very nice.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah sure, well you know, these impressions, you know, are created out of somebody’s figment.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, they are. It’s a quick one, you know, and not very thoughtful, actually.
Mr. Kolb: Well but people are, quote, different, you know. They don’t talk like we do and they don’t maybe think like we do, that kind of preconception just like Margaret Mead, she had a conception in her mind of what Oak Ridge was about. Okay, well your recreation was, I guess, largely family, family ordered, but you did say you played tennis. Did your husband play tennis?
Mrs. Cole: Un-huhn, for a while, until he found that he wasn’t very good at it and one day he threw down his tennis, tennis racket down and said that’s it, I’m not going to do it. It was typically Tom. You know he just said I’m not that good and he had to be good at what he was doing. Had to do with reactors, which made him a wonderful person in that field.
Mr. Kolb: 'Cause I played tennis when I came to Oak Ridge right away, and I was in a tennis league until, until nineteen, until I retired in 1994 but that was a long time.
Mrs. Cole: We played a few doubles, some doubles once in a while, but he really felt that he was, he said, “I was never a good ball man.” He was good teacher of swimming, he worked for the aquatic club and goodness he was president of it when it first started, and we had children, a child that went up like this in his swimming, when he was at Yale he could have been-
Mr. Kolb: Your oldest?
Mrs. Cole: That’s Hank, yes he could have been an Olympic swimmer he’s so good, the breaststroke.
Mr. Kolb: So Tom was active in the swimming club?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was that always early morning? I’ve got some friends that they had to get up at five o’clock every morning and take their kids for practice early.
Mrs. Cole: Well that happened later but I think that we had a very good person who was, was Jobe, and his name was, what was the first name, Jobe. But he was the head of the swimming club and after that, and we hired someone to do it when it became a big thing. It was wonderful for the children, and I’ve always been kind of semi a part of it, but I’m not of course anymore.
Mr. Kolb: They had to swim in the outdoor pool cause we didn’t have an indoor pool then.
Mrs. Cole: The outdoor pool, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So they only could swim in the warmer time of the year.
Mrs. Cole: Well they were shivering a lot of the times that we went, but you know Oak Ridge, it can be warm one day and then cold the next and the little kids, it's not, sort of skin and bones at that point, it can get pretty cold. We were the towel people.
Mr. Kolb: The towel people. Very important part, yeah. Without towels, you-
Mrs. Cole: Right, and then we went to a lot of track meets because of my son who was in track.
Mr. Kolb: In high school?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Which son was that?
Mrs. Cole: The older one, the younger was, the middle son was not, he was very good at swimming and that sort of thing but he was not a competitor essentially, and he won everything he ever did. Number one, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: These older children, that's what, that's what happens a lot. Did you take part in any, did they still have tennis court dances? Bill Pollock?
Mrs. Cole: Oh, we did almost, oh, Bill Pollock was part of our lives, you know. We went to a dance club, Tom and I, and we had a wonderful time there and Tom said, “I’m not a good dancer, Jean you always have to excuse me” and I said, “Well, Tom I can keep up the rhythm with you.”
Mr. Kolb: Sure, so those were still going on?
Mrs. Cole: I think so but we stopped before it got, we thought we looked a little old age and we said, let’s just quit we don’t need to do this anymore, we can go to other dances, which we’ve done.
Mr. Kolb: But I know that was a big activity in the WWII days 'cause Bill Pollock had these dances all over town, and it was amazing.
Mrs. Cole: Oh, he was so neat. I really, I really will never not miss him, because he had that wonderful smile, and you would go down, and say, okay, what do you want us to play, and we’d decide on records.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay Jean, well tell us a little bit more about when your kids got older in high school, you said your oldest son was real active in track and swimming, and by that time the schools were integrated I believe, right?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yes, right, so that had happened late '50s I believe, right.
Mrs. Cole: But I can add something to what you're asking me and that is that when he was ready to go to college, he got his full scholarship to go to the University of Tennessee and when he found out that black people, black students were not admitted he said, and he gave up his scholarship and went to Yale, which became expensive for his parents but he, well I mean he had a scholarship, and not to pay anything was very different, but anyway we-
Mr. Kolb: The principle to him was important.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh yeah. And I remember when Peter was in, our youngest son, Peter was at Web School, they still weren’t allowed, black students, and he left because of that, and told Mr. Web why. So it’s interesting to see there was fourteen years difference between Hank and Peter, and Ted is in the middle and I don’t remember whether Ted got into those things or not, but, my wonderful middle son.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, middle son. And Peter went on to UT. That's where he-
Mrs. Cole: No, Peter went to Vanderbilt. Ted went, Hank went to Yale, Ted went to the University of North Carolina and the two older boys both got their Master’s Degree.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well tell us about Planned Parenthood; how did that start and when did that get going?
Mrs. Cole: Right in Maryann and Jack Gibbon's lap, because I went up one day, we, Maryann and I were talking, and she’d been up with Jack to Berea, Kentucky to talk with a doctor up there, his name eludes me at the moment. I used to just be able to say it. And she was working with women who were having babies and they didn’t want babies and she found a solution, I’ll put it that way, that could be used for women to ninety percent of the time, they would not conceive if they used that. I can’t remember what the name of it was, but it was in a powdered form, and the reason I mention that is because we then took that into our souls and hearts at Maryann and Jack’s house. There were four of us who became the original board and officers.
Mr. Kolb: The Gibbons?
Mrs. Cole: At Jack and, Maryann was President and Jack was on that board as well, Willie Rose Claiborne was the lawyer and I was the secretary, and so we had a little beginning that way and then we became quite a large organization, but we had no money so we had all kinds of parties at Maryann’s house, which-
Mr. Kolb: Fundraising-
Mrs. Cole: Everybody loved to go to because they were just a lot of fun and so we would, Vivian Rue was here from France and she dressed up as a little French maid with a small skirt and little white apron and she collected more money than we’d ever gotten at any other function. So we needed, we needed money in order to support what we were going to do and we with wonderful friends like Julie Folkerson and Dot Hightower at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Is that Bill Folkerson’s wife?
Mrs. Cole: Bill Folkerson’s wife and Julie, well Bill was on the Board later on. He was on the first board, actually, later on, second board. And I became President after Maryann said I’d done it for two times, it’s somebody else’s turn, so I got, I got into it, and then Liz Peele right after that and we always had very good presidents. And it was a, a real, a real contest to see if we could do it because what we had half of Oak Ridge organized in that, you know they supported what we were doing, so it was a wonderful thing, and we set up a system so that the women could go to the public health department, we could, we could go to a doctor for health exams, and we started getting the first, the first time that everybody heard about the pill for women, and we got our first grant with, which was using a pill that had to be identified as working well and I remember the reason I said Julie Folkerson was because she and Dot Hightower kept incredible records about those pills that how the women were kept free from having a baby when they didn’t what one. And so that was our, that was the first big thing we did. We did some other things, we had a lot of contraceptives and at one point Maryann and Jack had a whole lot of contraceptives that they had down in the basement at their house, they were up on Outer, off of Outer Drive, and they, because we had a terrible rain, and Maryann and Jack ran down in the basement because it was a powder form and she said, low and behold it was running down through the-
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ruined.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I mean it was, it was sort of a joke, but some of it was ruined. Anyway, so then everybody made fun of us and said, well, you know, if your going to spread it around like that-
Mr. Kolb: Put it in the water, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Exactly, which is what had happened, so, anyway, but, it was just lots of humor and yet very dedicated people.
Mr. Kolb: But did you hire a staff person or was this all volunteer?
Mrs. Cole: Not for a long time. It was all volunteer. I think after four or five years we did. We had a wonderful staff member and she was excellent and died not too long after, it took about three years later.
Mr. Kolb: She was like a public health nurse.
Mrs. Cole: No she was not, she was just a wonderful secretary, who was a manager as well, we promoted her to that, she was that good. And my job, I got out of the presidency. It was, it was well organized and I didn’t need to do that, so I became, my job was to go out in the county and find the people who didn’t come to the clinics, who didn’t come to the public health and didn’t even know what birth control was all about. So that was my job and I worked about six counties finally.
Mr. Kolb: Well how did you do that? I mean how do you find people that don’t come forward? I mean, do you go knocking on their doors?
Mrs. Cole: I don’t know. I think I took my cue from the, the wonderful man who did it for the blind, going to the people and talking to them and then we would say, well have you ever talked to Mrs. So-and-so?
Mr. Kolb: And you go and talk to groups, right?
Mrs. Cole: Yes. Well actually just houses, I would start in a little country house and I’d make friends with some of the people in the county and they said, well I’ll take you with me and then I would go to the schools and talk to the teachers and-
Mr. Kolb: So sort of a network.
Mrs. Cole: It was a network and then eventually we had about six people working in that committee, and I was in charge of it. And I loved it. I got to know so many people, wonderful people, lot of problems, lots of little children, very, very poor families, some prostitutes which had had many, many encounters with men and even persuaded a couple of them that it might be a good idea to have birth control. But the idea was not to persuade the idea was to make it someone else’s idea, because my work in college was in sociology and I think that kind of stuck with me, let the decision be something that comes at the arrival through information.
Mr. Kolb: It’s more lasting that way at least.
Mrs. Cole: Right, right. So that’s how I got to do it, and then I continued for almost, I’ll say 13 to 16 years, and then I got, it was called being out on a limb, where you get so your honored but not doing what you ought to do. So, well you know going out in the state and so forth, and I didn’t want to do that kind of work so I stopped. But I‘ve always been a proponent of it, and of course now, let’s see, it was mainly Oak Ridge that was supporting it, and then we got Knoxville to do it, and then they became modestly interested, I’ll put it that way, and now it’s spread to Nashville, which is the headquarters now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, for the state?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anything like United Way funding back then at any time?
Mrs. Cole: Yes but we got pushed out, you know, after a while and that was terrible, because of abortions, so, and we got in the midst of all that, so.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I remember that.
Mrs. Cole: We lost a, I think, a $100,000 grant or something because of that. Well I thought they should have hid the doctor in another room and said no we don’t have a doctor at this site, but nobody believed me. I thought it could have been done that way.
Mr. Kolb: Well it was an important, important activity that did pay off, that’s for sure. I’m sure a lot of women would thank their lucky stars that they met you or others, but-
Mrs. Cole: I don’t know, I think it was a, we, in my mind at least what I did was to give them at their mind to decide what they wanted to do. But I worked with some young people, just, with the Anderson County Health Council, who felt freedom of choice was very important, but there was one group of young teenagers who’d all had babies, and I think Virginia Coleman was important to this sort of grant that we got that helped the young people decide how to take care of their babies and incidentally to learn that there was birth control, which Anderson County Health Council, don’t put that in your thing, they didn’t approve of.
Mr. Kolb: Oh they didn’t.
Mrs. Cole: No.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that was not generally accepted back then I guess.
Mrs. Cole: I was, well, it's not that long ago. It was before Tom got his stroke. It wasn't, I mean, I stopped being on the Anderson County Health Council.
Mr. Kolb: Were you on the Health Council then?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, well I got back into it a little bit. There was no planned parenthood at that point around here, so that’s what I did, and I was interested in it, but I found it was very anti-abortion, therefore, quote, I don’t know what, and at that point Tom got ill and so I just didn’t do it anymore.
Mr. Kolb: I think you mentioned earlier that, did your parents live with you when they were elderly?
Mrs. Cole: My father was dying when he came to Oak Ridge and he came with my mother and we all lived together. We moved to this house from the B-house right next door because I was having a baby and we were entitled to three bedrooms and when my mother and father came they took the bedroom that Tom and I have with the bath, and it was no stopping because I was having this baby and it was born the day before Christmas, no it was the day of Christmas night.
Mr. Kolb: Christmas Eve night okay.
Mrs. Cole: No Christmas night.
Mr. Kolb: Christmas night okay, okay, it was a Christmas baby.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, that was Ted, the middle son, and my father died with my little baby in his arms in a bedroom here at that house a few months later. He had emphysema and I won’t go into that.
Mr. Kolb: And your mother stayed with you?
Mrs. Cole: Mother stayed with us, and my sister was up in Boston area, and so she would go up there to see them but mother began to have what we call Alzheimer’s today, and I’ve always been petrified that I would have it and if I’m making mistakes now, it seems like I’m getting it, tell me. It’s a terrible thing but we found a wonderful place to take her. It was a very, very hard time in our lives, because the children were four and eight at that time, and I found a very wonderful place out in Concord, the Little Creek Sanitarium, and mother loved it and she died there very quickly of a heart attack, but it was a blessing at the time, 'cause she didn’t have to go through the hard part. So that was, so then I lost my parents and then this house was just us with the children.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, well that was plenty, with three little, three boys, it was very, very active I’m sure. Okay.
Mrs. Cole: But Peter didn’t come till fourteen years later so it was-
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know, it was quite a spread there, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: The only one I planned for, always said to Maryann, and Maryann too, actually, she and I both had little babies, and we, people would say, "My goodness you're showing off that you're planned parenthood people and you're both having babies. How could you do that?" Well Maryann said, "These are the first ones we’ve planned." No, I think I said that. I don’t know about Maryann.
Mr. Kolb: You got around to planning eventually here, here’s one that’s planned.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I found out how to, yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: When you're young you don’t have to plan, you want children so they just happen and everything's normal, yeah, that's right.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Jean, I know you’re a happy Oak Ridger, but what do you think makes, or did make Oak Ridge a unique community? Would you agree with me that it’s a unique community?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I don’t want to put words in you mouth, but.
Mrs. Cole: I lived in Winter Park, Florida for a while, I formally lived in a Hudson River town called Poughkeepsie in New York, but my second home was in Winter Park, Florida, and where I grew up, when I was, I was fourteen when we went there and I thought that was a wonderful city in Florida, and my mother became part of it. Coming up here, this was like, it was like home almost immediately, you know, it was a very close and yet vigorous town, lots of interesting people living next door to such a wonderful family as the Arnold’s and Elizabeth Arnold got her degree from, in French, actually, from the Sorbonne, and just a wonderful, wonderful person, and we were very close friends, and then I still miss many of the people who have had to leave or have died, because they were so, we were so close. And I just had been involved with a friend of mine whose husband just died and she said to me, “I had no idea how many wonderful friends I have, because they’re always there for me.”
Mr. Kolb: You took them for granted.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, it’s kind of an encompassing community if you do a lot of things, if you remain just only going to a church and that’s your life, that’s fine. That becomes that community. But those of us who have lived here quite a long time are pretty much involved with the whole community. The orchestra means so much-
Mr. Kolb: Right, right, yeah, Playhouse.
Mrs. Cole: The Art Center, the Playhouse and each one, I used to, when I was in college, I was in plays, and I used to love it, and, you know, all of these things sort of come together and help problems, community, outer community, the counties around us, being a Tennessean. That’s a whole new word for somebody who came from somewhere else, right?
Mr. Kolb: Right, exactly.
Mrs. Cole: So I think that we’re very lucky here and then you keep meeting new people and then you introduce them to the community so I think we are very, very fortunate and really very wonderful to have Oak Ridge National Lab here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yes.
Mrs. Cole: K-25 certainly was a hub, but that of course has changed now, but the lab is still continuing and I guess according to what I hear, and actually I went out there the other day.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you did?
Mrs. Cole: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, what was the occasion?
Mrs. Cole: We had done a mural from the, from the Art Center, Jane Larson and her crew and my crew went out there, and it was a wonderful thing.
Mr. Kolb: Is that in the entrance to the main lab?
Mrs. Cole: Exactly, it's inside not outside. And we did a fall, what I'd call, a fall one. Jane knew the women whose husband was one the directors for the lab, I guess. I don’t think it was Wadsworth but I don’t remember the other guy's name, but he’s there. Anyway his wife was a good friend of hers, and, oh, I think they lived in Washington before that, and she wanted Jane to do this and the lab became interested and that’s how we got involved with, the last one I guess we’ll do with Jane here, because she was getting pretty tired and had to sit down a lot, don’t quote me on that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that's okay.
Mrs. Cole: But we had a very enthusiastic group of people that helped put that together, and then we did, all the glazing and the firing was done in Oak Ridge with an oxidation fire. All the ones I did with Jane were reduction fire, and Tom and I literally took the one that’s on the outside of the Art Center and took it up to Washington to Jane so she could fire it in the reduction kiln. How we did it without breaking a single tile, I’ll never know. And Jane and I did a lot of the painting up there because she had certain glazes that we didn’t have in Oak Ridge and so, it's, you can tell very much about that, the one at the Art Center is a good example of the kind of glazing that we did, and I did a lot with it, and I loved it. But my glazing is on pots and-
Mr. Kolb: Smaller objects.
Mrs. Cole: Or they could be quite big like Nefertiti Chicken over there. That’s Nefertiti. She’s a chicken, though, and lots of humorous things that I like to do with, I guess you can tell that I love to cook things in there that are in my mind. I’ve got a group of pots downstairs with, that I call “All At Sea” and it's all with animals in a row boat, and the pig is protesting to the elephant that’s at the other end cause they don’t know which is the, whether they're going forward or backward.
Mr. Kolb: Like which ends is up, which way are we going?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, and they’re all wearing, some are wearing crowns and others are wearing funny hats and so forth.
Mr. Kolb: Getting the row together is progress.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. I’ve just gotten my clay fixed again after Tom’s death. I haven’t been able to use it, and now I’m ready to do some more.
Mr. Kolb: Your kiln?
Mrs. Cole: My kiln is okay. It was the clay that was clogged up, so I couldn’t use it. I had a big, it’s called a de-airing machine, it’s mechanical, like, fired, and it was all, all the clay was absolutely nothing but one huge rock inside.
Mr. Kolb: They all dried out basically?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: So you have to get new clay that way or-
Mrs. Cole: No, I made it work.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Cole: Don’t ask me why, anyway, so that’s happening again in my life and I’m just about ready to do it.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Cole: So let’s see what else about Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well the people that you had, came in contact with from all over the world basically, it's just amazing how, a big melting pot here.
Mrs. Cole: I was going to say we are very lucky. I hiked with Mr. Wigner.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, Eugene Wigner?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, with Jack and Maryann Gibbons, as a matter of fact. They had him up in the county to hike with us. I was able to see him. I saw quite a few, and when we went to the conference in Geneva, we were involved in that, and then we have a lot of French friends over there so I still have, they used to be here in Oak Ridge and then they’ve gone back to France or to Geneva and so they’re still my friends and I’m going over there in August to see a couple of them.
Mr. Kolb: Great that’s wonderful.
Mrs. Cole: And my children said, "You're going alone, Mother?" And I said, "Why not?" I’m going to Geneva and I think they’ll pick me up. So that’s just an aside.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s good. I’m glad you have maintained those contacts, that’s important.
Mrs. Cole: But in terms of Oak Ridge, I think there was almost nothing you couldn't suggest for an organization. If you look at the organization chapter that came to us a couple of days ago at all the organizations, it’s quite incredible.
Mr. Kolb: It is, everything going for a town this size.
Mrs. Cole: And you can’t say how lonesome we get. You didn’t cry, and look what ORCMA has done for us.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ORCMA is wonderful, and ORICLE.
Mrs. Cole: I mean ORICLE, yeah, ORCMA as well, and the Playhouse, and so forth.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, when we go on trips and we talk about ORICLE to people, and they say, they’re just amazed, you know. Well we have our university. Well the university does that too, but we have it right here in our little local town, you know.
Mrs. Cole: And Roane State, isn’t that a great deal to us? Elizabeth Arnold worked very hard to get a different kind of college here. And they had actually compiled some money for it to make it work, and in the end they gave it to Roane State.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah that’s been very successful and-
Mrs. Cole: I think we did the right thing actually. She was looking for a more intellectual college, and I think, in our area here, this has meant so much, especially if you go over to Roane State, the main campus, it’s wonderful over in the Kingston area, Rockwood, so I think we’ve gained a great deal as well as giving a good bit. So I think that’s one of the good things in life, isn't it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and it draws people of the community, from the outside community into Oak Ridge, too, and makes them more involved too, I think, yeah. Okay, well listen, I think we’ve touched all the bases that I had on my list. This has been wonderful, Jean.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I’m sorry to, I wanted to tell you something and you can turn it off, but I, I just read this-
[end of recording]
transcribed: Jan 2005
typed by: lb
reviewed: Jan 2010
edited by: amhb

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF JEAN COLE
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
April 30, 2004
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Jean, tell us first how and why you and your husband, Tom, came to Oak Ridge in '46. Right?
Mrs. Cole: Tom had been in the Navy and was discharged from the Navy after World War II, and he went back to college at Rollins and after he graduated he came up the corridor here to Chicago to interview with the, a company that one of my cousin’s father owned, and when he got there he then came back through and he had a good interview, and he came back through. What he didn’t know was Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was not aware of it at all. And he said well, what goes on here, and somebody said well there’s a new laboratory and so forth and it's been working here during World War II, which of course he wouldn’t have known. So I think the first person that he met at the laboratory who interviewed him was Ernie Walland, yeah, it was a very nice interview and he got a job here and he decided I don’t want to go there. So that’s why we came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Did he involve you in the decision about working here?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes, we were on the telephone together and I was in Winter Park at the time. My family are from Poughkeepsie, New York and Connecticut. And so I had a little baby at that point, little Hank Cole, and we came up here with a car full of baby things and so forth, which my Navy man was not very used to at that point, a lot of Navy people instead.
Mr. Kolb: And that was in what time?
Mrs. Cole: So that would be 1946.
Mr. Kolb: About what month, do you have any idea, roughly?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, it was, well, it was, it was still warm weather so I think it was actually quite hot.
Mr. Kolb: In the summer probably.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. I think, I don’t remember exactly so I can’t tell you.
Mr. Kolb: So the town was still a closed town.
Mrs. Cole: It was still a closed town.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get the badge, have badges?
Mrs. Cole: And he had to meet me at the gate in order for me to come in and then he, I don’t know why this happened, but it seems to me we were in one car, so I must not have driven, I must have come by train, and then he must have picked me up with Hank at the train.
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville?
Mrs. Cole: In Knoxville. And so then he drove me all around here and he kept saying well see, look, we're burning coal here and these little houses where everybody’s living in, and I said, “Oh, okay, that’s fine.” And he was on the west side of town where they were just tons of these little, what did you call them at that time?
Mr. Kolb: Flattops?
Mrs. Cole: Flattops.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh there were tons of them and lots of coal burning bins outside, and the smell was incredible, you know, and I had been in South Africa with my, later on I had been in South Africa and when I was there the smell of coal was everywhere, which I hadn't expected.
Mr. Kolb: The sulfur coal, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. And of course when we came to our, he took me the long way around and he said see aren’t these great, and I said oh sure they’re fine. And so, then, he was just kidding, you know, and when he came here I just didn't know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you thought you were going to wind up in one of those.
Mrs. Cole: Well, yeah, I thought that, you know, I was going to have a husband again after all these years to me and a little baby. So we came to Diston Road and-
Mr. Kolb: To this house?
Mrs. Cole: We were in the little B-house right next door, and that was all we were allowed because at that time the Manhattan, then it wasn't, it was called Roane Anderson at that time, said that you could not have a house unless, if you had one baby or two, you could have a two bedroom house but that was all.
Mr. Kolb: So you got a B?
Mrs. Cole: So we had a B-house, which was charming, and I was just, and of course we found, I found out that it was full of coal smoke very quickly when it got cold weather, and I think my husband lost his temper many times over the explosion of having put too much coal in the stove and I had ordered pink rugs.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, boy, the soot.
Mrs. Cole: So we had, we had lots of cleaning to do. Anyway, but I loved it and we were right next door to Elizabeth and St. George Tucker Arnold.
Mr. Kolb: Where they in this house?
Mrs. Cole: They were in the house next door, on the other side. One-oh, we were, this is 103, and that's 101 and 105. And so Elizabeth and St. George had two little children, one was, Tucker was Hank’s age or so and became a wonderful friendship, like family, I guess when my mother and father both died in this house later on and I really had no family here and they were like family and I don’t remember. In fact, their children are still my family, and Hank keeps us with Tucker and Liz, one in, one in California and one in Florida. So to make a long story short that is where we landed with this little boy.
Mr. Kolb: And what was Oak Ridge like in terms of, were the streets paved by then, for example?
Mrs. Cole: Yes they were and we had some sidewalks, we had this, no, I can remember when they changed the elevation of the street and we, instead of being on the street level we were below the street level and we had to have stairs to go to the house, so that, and I think there about seven steps to get down here and then we had this wonderful positioning. This is not at the B-house. At the B-house, it was very simple to get in and I think we had wonderful neighbors. The neighborhood had more than forty children on the road here between the top and the bottom and that was typically Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was full of children.
Mrs. Cole: Because we were all, now as elder people, as grandparents now, we all had a lot of children.
Mr. Kolb: And your kids went to what school, then?
Mrs. Cole: We went to Elm Grove.
Mr. Kolb: Elm Grove, out on Tennessee, right? And they all went there I presume.
Mrs. Cole: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you didn’t work, but Tom worked, I mean, but you got very active in-
Mrs. Cole: Right, he was at the laboratory, right.
Mr. Kolb: Now you got very, but, let’s see, the rationing was over by then, I guess, you didn’t have to stand in line.
Mrs. Cole: No we were not, and Tom just couldn’t understand it because in the Navy you could have real butter. Well that’s another story.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but that’s true, but then that’s the thing about early Oak Ridge. Okay, so you got very involved in the arts community here in Oak Ridge. Tell us how that started. Or was that later on? I don’t know exactly when that happened.
Mrs. Cole: Well, actually I was part of the first Art Center that was located up on Outer Drive here at what used to be a store and a drug store and various things and then-
Mr. Kolb: It's still there.
Mrs. Cole: it’s still there and then when they left, there was a room that was vacated, because it was partitioned off, and that’s where the first meeting of the Art Center started.
Mr. Kolb: Now let me back up. Had you done pottery already at that time?
Mrs. Cole: Not at all. No, I was a painter. I took, when I was in France as a little girl, lived there for a year, I took drawing and painting lessons. That was part of the school curriculum and I had always drawn and liked art.
Mr. Kolb: You had an interest in art.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, always, I never thought of pottery except that I loved seeing a man do it up in New York State a little bit.
Mr. Kolb: So who else was involved in the Art Center early on?
Mrs. Cole: Well, Miriam Kohler was one of them, who, and Wylie Kohler was at the lab, and they were part of it. I don’t remember a lot of the people. Shortly thereafter, two very wonderful people who came to Oak Ridge from Norris were the Eplers, E. P. Eppler and Elizabeth, beautiful artist as well. I wish I had one of her paintings. And they became our, I guess, our number two family, Tom took me up to see them one day and E. P. was raising strawberries and he insisted that I go back home and get a bigger basket cause I had, I just brought a little one, you know, didn't want to, anyway. So typical, little things like that made life so wonderful and children and families and lots of, the Peterson’s had four children in one house and the Milner’s had two across the street and the Arnold’s had two and it was just a wonderful time. The London’s came very shortly.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they still there?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, Mike and-
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Mike London?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I worked for Mike, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: His picture was just in the paper the other day.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was a tax service, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh my, he loves doing it too.
Mr. Kolb: But then was Jane, was it Jenny Larson, was she involved then, Mrs. Larson?
Mrs. Cole: In the art, oh she certainly was. She did the part of the Art Center that was the Pottery Department, and also she helped locate the original building which is still there, the Art Center, where it is, and got permission from the city, we're city, at least, the land the city owned.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Cole: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: Ok, I didn’t know that, I see.
Mrs. Cole: It has a lot to do with what we can do to the Art Center.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, that's true, and be non-taxable, while your, it's a good situation.
Mrs. Cole: But that, that is my art background that started then, and it was very small because I had a lot of other things I was doing.
Mr. Kolb: Like what?
Mrs. Cole: Oh, well, with children you always have a lot of things. If you have little boys, they’re all going to be cubs scouts if that’s what they’ve chosen, and guess what you had to be the cub scout mother.
Mr. Kolb: Den mother, yeah, right, okay, take your turn, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: That's right, and so this back yard was full of children doing all kinds of things and lots of costumes coming from it, lots of play acting, lots of hiking and going in the woods and finding-
Mr. Kolb: Critters, whatever.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, critters and wildflowers. Salamanders used to be in this little stream down here.
Mr. Kolb: Now were the boardwalks to the schools still-
Mrs. Cole: There were some old ones still here and playground, there was a playground right up on this hill here. They had them all over town. Actually, it was metal bar with a swing and a, and when we came there was slide and some kind of a rope thing, it wasn’t a very big thing.
Mr. Kolb: But it wasn’t part of the school ground it was separate.
Mrs. Cole: No it was in all the communities. But see, well, there was 75,000 people here. So by the time we came it was reduced, I guess, to about 42,000, something like that, I don't know the statistics. So art we were talking about.
Mr. Kolb: Right, so the Art Center was just being formed and you got on the board, I believe, some time back in then.
Mrs. Cole: Oh I’ve forgotten what I did, but I think the main thing was that I found out that I was very interested in art and wanted to continue that, but it wasn’t a big deal because I did other things as well, and I think what made me the most interested was working with Buck Ewing and about ten different artists doing painting for about 10 years.
Mr. Kolb: The UT Professor?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, he was called Buck. Yes, Buck Ewing and Elizabeth Eppler was one of the people, Mary Gomez was one of the people. It was a wonderful art class, and we met for about ten years.
Mr. Kolb: Did you go to Knoxville for those classes.
Mrs. Cole: No, Buck came out here to the Art Center and I think one of the fun things at the end of this, we were, and I don’t think it could happen, it’s a woodpecker going on out there, he loves that tree, and the Art Center, Buck said, well we’re going to have an exhibit, and we said, "What?" And he said we’re going to be exhibited in the library at UT, so that’s what we were. And I don’t think that could happen today. But Mary Gomez was quite an interesting painter and Elizabeth Eppler was, and I happened to be in that class too. Lee, I trying to think of her last name, Lee, I have one of her paintings. It's called “Looking through the keyhole in Oak Ridge.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, "Looking through the Keyhole," I have to see that later. So you had a really wonderful, well you know, that’s the thing about Tennessee it’s sort of thought of as being backward but there is a lot of culture here through Knoxville and the people that were here.
Mrs. Cole: Well I think the most important thing that happened in my life was that we had, when the colored people, the black people were going through that terrible time of shooting and Edgar, Edgars, and all that that happened, and I was very much involved in that, as were many of my friends, and I didn’t know the difference, I’d lived in Florida where we had black people all the time at our house and my father was a contractor and used them and I never thought of them as black.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, of course, they still were segregated then.
Mrs. Cole: That’s true but-
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t go to your schools and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Cole: That’s right and we worked for that, my mother did, so I wasn’t coming to this by myself but we had wonderful friends and some that worked for me and I, actually, the Griffin family over in Oliver Springs is a wonderful black family and they were, most people knew them in Oliver Springs at the time, and they were probably the leaders of black thought for what was needed for them to become nonsegregated, and they didn’t think of it that way but many of us white people were their friends and I got to know them very well, in fact I just went to a funeral there the other day and got warmly hugged which was sweet. I really knew them very well and the woman whose husband worked for me, she worked for me and then I, well everybody that I knew wanted to help them get into better jobs. We thought as servants in a house or a maid or just a day cleaner it was important for them because they were smart and they didn’t need to be doing those things, so whenever we could we did one more thing to give them more chance for a better education and a better job and that’s what happened to Sanretta, who worked for me, and she ended up working in accounting and as I said, they were all smart. And then her husband came and worked for us from time to time, we built a basement in the meantime here and he just, he loved doing that and did several others and doors became places where they, the family who were doing it hadn’t planned on, cause he just decided this was a good place to put the door. Anyway, but we never complained, but my thought about him was that he was a lovely, lovely man, and he was semi-minister, whatever you call that, you know they weren’t trained, but his little boy was the first one that was taken to the Clinton school after all the riots, and Sanretta was at my house when that happened, and I had to hug her the whole time because she was so afraid that they might get shot, but they made it. So that was part of what was really a part of my life for quite a time.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that was in the later '50s, wasn't it?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: When the desegregation movement came through and Oak Ridge became desegregated first in Tennessee, yeah, yeah, it was a tense time but, you know, it was, it was important, had to happen sooner or later, it just took a long time. So you had these contacts with the black community or the Afro-American Community.
Mrs. Cole: Oh yeah and they’re still part of my family.
Mr. Kolb: You say the name Griffin?
Mrs. Cole: Griffin family.
Mr. Kolb: Are there still some in Oliver Springs?
Mrs. Cole: Mhm, as I said, I just went to the service of Kathleen and it was just like being home with those people they all came up and gave me a hug because we were like family, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, my wife had the same experience. She comes from Kentucky. They had, you know, black servants there, workers, but they treated them just like family, like you said.
Mrs. Cole: I have to give my mother a lot of credit for this because in Penn School was located right on the, I’m trying to think what, it’s on the coast, and it's on a, you can only get to it by boat, the ferry boat, and there was a school there called Penn School and my family in Poughkeepsie, New York helped finance that, my grandmother did, and then my mother, and one time my father and mother on their way to Florida where we lived for ten years stopped by there and I've never had such an experience because, you know, we were sort of embarrassed, they sat us in the front seats and they introduced us, you know, all that sort of thing and that was not what it was about, it was just to see the school and how they were teaching the youngsters and there was a book written about that school.
Mr. Kolb: This is a school for Afro-Americans?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, which is kind of unique, okay.
Mrs. Cole: And it was financed by people like those in the Presbyterian Church that my family were involved in. Wonderful experience so you just didn’t have any feeling except they are our people, you know, their people if they wanted to be. Freedom is the most important thing.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah. Opportunity, yeah. Well that’s interesting, you know I was raised in Wisconsin where black people didn’t exist, I mean I never saw a black person until I went to my two cousins in Chicago, Illinois where there were blacks there a lot but I never saw them in my hometown, there wasn’t anybody.
Mrs. Cole: Did you know Audie Curtis? She said the same thing. She was from Wisconsin, yeah, very different.
Mr. Kolb: Later on you got exposed. Okay, well, well tell us about, about Oak Ridge when it started changing from being a government run city by Roane Anderson and the first city council and how the city formed its first government and the changes when people had to take responsibility, in other words, for, for their finances and all that kind of thing, was that, that would be, that would be like, I guess, in the what, '50s? When, I forget when they first-
Mrs. Cole: I don’t have the date in my mind.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was early, sometime in the '50s and it was quite controversial.
Mrs. Cole: I thought it was sooner than that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, maybe so. Actually when the gates opened in '49 there was a referendum, right? Do you remember that?
Mrs. Cole: Yes I do and I was going to tell you I was there when the gates came down, you know, as it were, so we didn’t have people-
Mr. Kolb: But leading up to that they took a vote about whether they should open the gates or not?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: What happened about that?
Mrs. Cole: Well all I remember is that we won.
Mr. Kolb: But I understand the first vote was to not open the gates.
Mrs. Cole: Well I don’t remember that, 'cause I only voted, you know, I didn’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember that day when, were you here when the gates, when they had the big celebration.
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes and I think I took, I’m trying to think, one child was born in '44 and the other one in '48.
Mr. Kolb: So you had two children then, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Right, so I had little Ted at that point, yeah, so, but I do remember it vividly and it was quite a, you know, huzzah day.
Mr. Kolb: Celebration, big parade and all the Hollywood types were here. Marie McDonald was here as I recall.
Mrs. Cole: Oh I don’t remember we had a lot of, Margaret Mead was the one that always comes to my mind because she was here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh she was here during, during that day?
Mrs. Cole: No, no, but later on, the famous people department.
Mr. Kolb: Well tell me about Margaret Mead then.
Mrs. Cole: Well she was very controversial when she came here and I didn’t think of her that way I was quite surprised at the reception that was kind of divided really about her. But it was her, it had to do with a remark that she made, you know how things come out in the paper, and it had to do with a remark that she made about, sorry I can’t quote it right now.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, just the gist of it.
Mrs. Cole: But what she was, what she did, what she felt about Oak Ridge was not what Oak Ridge was and she was quite caustic about it in her remark, that’s all I’ll say and so people pounced on it and then she had to backtrack a bit.
Mr. Kolb: She had a preconceived idea about the education of Oak Ridgers?
Mrs. Cole: Yes, and she wasn’t listening well, yes, I think she thought we weren’t, you know, you know what her book was about.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, well, I think she was thinking of Oak Ridge not living up to that kind of thing that she had done in her book, and that we were ostracizing or making little of some people who were, should be have, it should have been inclusive, I’ll put it that way.
Mr. Kolb: More inclusive.
Mrs. Cole: And it was, it was, it was quite interesting that she took that impression of Oak Ridge which was really continually reaching out. I always think of Oak Ridge as a reaching out community, and in a sense we didn’t very much to Knoxville at all. We were more involved in people around the county and different counties around us.
Mr. Kolb: Right, the rural area more.
Mrs. Cole: But I’m not sure how many people were involved, because I was so involved in it, so, you know, when you get into that, especially because of Planned Parenthood.
Mr. Kolb: Well speaking of involvement, what, what about Knoxville per se? Did you have any good or bad relations of shopping there and that kind of-
Mrs. Cole: Well, I played tennis at that time, so I got to know a few Knoxvillians and I loved tennis and that was, we had the free courts here and you could just go down and play with your friends, so I enjoyed doing that, and I got to know a few of the Sterkee family and so forth in Knoxville, and they, I think, I can’t remember, but I think they ended up in Florida, the ones I knew best.
Mr. Kolb: This is furniture company, Sterkee Furniture?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, but there’s the younger generation and they moved to Florida and I did see them a couple of times there. I think her husband died in the house where she lived.
Mr. Kolb: But some people have said that some of the merchants sort of looked down their noses at Oak Ridgers or they thought they were, Oak Ridgers were, thought they were too good for Knoxville, and they didn't accept, they liked our money but they, they thought-
Mrs. Cole: I think we felt a little ostracized, I don't know if that’s a good word.
Mr. Kolb: Did you feel that?
Mrs. Cole: I think we felt that, I’m not sure it was true because I never paid much attention to it. It was more talk of somebody, and, oh, I don’t know, I guess so, I don't know.
Mr. Kolb: So you never had any bad experiences yourself?
Mrs. Cole: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, but there was talk like that, that’s what I’ve heard.
Mrs. Cole: Well we had a very good department store there for one thing, Miller’s and then what was the other one?
Mr. Kolb: In Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cole: No in Knoxville, and actually Miller’s came here, didn't they.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and Loveman’s, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: So there were a lot of reasons to do some shopping there. But the people that I knew were very, very nice they all seemed to be quite wealthy which is what we were not, and I was kind of, and that happened maybe because of going to clubs with tennis or something like that, but lovely people, very nice.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah sure, well you know, these impressions, you know, are created out of somebody’s figment.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, they are. It’s a quick one, you know, and not very thoughtful, actually.
Mr. Kolb: Well but people are, quote, different, you know. They don’t talk like we do and they don’t maybe think like we do, that kind of preconception just like Margaret Mead, she had a conception in her mind of what Oak Ridge was about. Okay, well your recreation was, I guess, largely family, family ordered, but you did say you played tennis. Did your husband play tennis?
Mrs. Cole: Un-huhn, for a while, until he found that he wasn’t very good at it and one day he threw down his tennis, tennis racket down and said that’s it, I’m not going to do it. It was typically Tom. You know he just said I’m not that good and he had to be good at what he was doing. Had to do with reactors, which made him a wonderful person in that field.
Mr. Kolb: 'Cause I played tennis when I came to Oak Ridge right away, and I was in a tennis league until, until nineteen, until I retired in 1994 but that was a long time.
Mrs. Cole: We played a few doubles, some doubles once in a while, but he really felt that he was, he said, “I was never a good ball man.” He was good teacher of swimming, he worked for the aquatic club and goodness he was president of it when it first started, and we had children, a child that went up like this in his swimming, when he was at Yale he could have been-
Mr. Kolb: Your oldest?
Mrs. Cole: That’s Hank, yes he could have been an Olympic swimmer he’s so good, the breaststroke.
Mr. Kolb: So Tom was active in the swimming club?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was that always early morning? I’ve got some friends that they had to get up at five o’clock every morning and take their kids for practice early.
Mrs. Cole: Well that happened later but I think that we had a very good person who was, was Jobe, and his name was, what was the first name, Jobe. But he was the head of the swimming club and after that, and we hired someone to do it when it became a big thing. It was wonderful for the children, and I’ve always been kind of semi a part of it, but I’m not of course anymore.
Mr. Kolb: They had to swim in the outdoor pool cause we didn’t have an indoor pool then.
Mrs. Cole: The outdoor pool, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So they only could swim in the warmer time of the year.
Mrs. Cole: Well they were shivering a lot of the times that we went, but you know Oak Ridge, it can be warm one day and then cold the next and the little kids, it's not, sort of skin and bones at that point, it can get pretty cold. We were the towel people.
Mr. Kolb: The towel people. Very important part, yeah. Without towels, you-
Mrs. Cole: Right, and then we went to a lot of track meets because of my son who was in track.
Mr. Kolb: In high school?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Which son was that?
Mrs. Cole: The older one, the younger was, the middle son was not, he was very good at swimming and that sort of thing but he was not a competitor essentially, and he won everything he ever did. Number one, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: These older children, that's what, that's what happens a lot. Did you take part in any, did they still have tennis court dances? Bill Pollock?
Mrs. Cole: Oh, we did almost, oh, Bill Pollock was part of our lives, you know. We went to a dance club, Tom and I, and we had a wonderful time there and Tom said, “I’m not a good dancer, Jean you always have to excuse me” and I said, “Well, Tom I can keep up the rhythm with you.”
Mr. Kolb: Sure, so those were still going on?
Mrs. Cole: I think so but we stopped before it got, we thought we looked a little old age and we said, let’s just quit we don’t need to do this anymore, we can go to other dances, which we’ve done.
Mr. Kolb: But I know that was a big activity in the WWII days 'cause Bill Pollock had these dances all over town, and it was amazing.
Mrs. Cole: Oh, he was so neat. I really, I really will never not miss him, because he had that wonderful smile, and you would go down, and say, okay, what do you want us to play, and we’d decide on records.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay Jean, well tell us a little bit more about when your kids got older in high school, you said your oldest son was real active in track and swimming, and by that time the schools were integrated I believe, right?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yes, right, so that had happened late '50s I believe, right.
Mrs. Cole: But I can add something to what you're asking me and that is that when he was ready to go to college, he got his full scholarship to go to the University of Tennessee and when he found out that black people, black students were not admitted he said, and he gave up his scholarship and went to Yale, which became expensive for his parents but he, well I mean he had a scholarship, and not to pay anything was very different, but anyway we-
Mr. Kolb: The principle to him was important.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, oh yeah. And I remember when Peter was in, our youngest son, Peter was at Web School, they still weren’t allowed, black students, and he left because of that, and told Mr. Web why. So it’s interesting to see there was fourteen years difference between Hank and Peter, and Ted is in the middle and I don’t remember whether Ted got into those things or not, but, my wonderful middle son.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, middle son. And Peter went on to UT. That's where he-
Mrs. Cole: No, Peter went to Vanderbilt. Ted went, Hank went to Yale, Ted went to the University of North Carolina and the two older boys both got their Master’s Degree.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well tell us about Planned Parenthood; how did that start and when did that get going?
Mrs. Cole: Right in Maryann and Jack Gibbon's lap, because I went up one day, we, Maryann and I were talking, and she’d been up with Jack to Berea, Kentucky to talk with a doctor up there, his name eludes me at the moment. I used to just be able to say it. And she was working with women who were having babies and they didn’t want babies and she found a solution, I’ll put it that way, that could be used for women to ninety percent of the time, they would not conceive if they used that. I can’t remember what the name of it was, but it was in a powdered form, and the reason I mention that is because we then took that into our souls and hearts at Maryann and Jack’s house. There were four of us who became the original board and officers.
Mr. Kolb: The Gibbons?
Mrs. Cole: At Jack and, Maryann was President and Jack was on that board as well, Willie Rose Claiborne was the lawyer and I was the secretary, and so we had a little beginning that way and then we became quite a large organization, but we had no money so we had all kinds of parties at Maryann’s house, which-
Mr. Kolb: Fundraising-
Mrs. Cole: Everybody loved to go to because they were just a lot of fun and so we would, Vivian Rue was here from France and she dressed up as a little French maid with a small skirt and little white apron and she collected more money than we’d ever gotten at any other function. So we needed, we needed money in order to support what we were going to do and we with wonderful friends like Julie Folkerson and Dot Hightower at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Is that Bill Folkerson’s wife?
Mrs. Cole: Bill Folkerson’s wife and Julie, well Bill was on the Board later on. He was on the first board, actually, later on, second board. And I became President after Maryann said I’d done it for two times, it’s somebody else’s turn, so I got, I got into it, and then Liz Peele right after that and we always had very good presidents. And it was a, a real, a real contest to see if we could do it because what we had half of Oak Ridge organized in that, you know they supported what we were doing, so it was a wonderful thing, and we set up a system so that the women could go to the public health department, we could, we could go to a doctor for health exams, and we started getting the first, the first time that everybody heard about the pill for women, and we got our first grant with, which was using a pill that had to be identified as working well and I remember the reason I said Julie Folkerson was because she and Dot Hightower kept incredible records about those pills that how the women were kept free from having a baby when they didn’t what one. And so that was our, that was the first big thing we did. We did some other things, we had a lot of contraceptives and at one point Maryann and Jack had a whole lot of contraceptives that they had down in the basement at their house, they were up on Outer, off of Outer Drive, and they, because we had a terrible rain, and Maryann and Jack ran down in the basement because it was a powder form and she said, low and behold it was running down through the-
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ruined.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I mean it was, it was sort of a joke, but some of it was ruined. Anyway, so then everybody made fun of us and said, well, you know, if your going to spread it around like that-
Mr. Kolb: Put it in the water, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: Exactly, which is what had happened, so, anyway, but, it was just lots of humor and yet very dedicated people.
Mr. Kolb: But did you hire a staff person or was this all volunteer?
Mrs. Cole: Not for a long time. It was all volunteer. I think after four or five years we did. We had a wonderful staff member and she was excellent and died not too long after, it took about three years later.
Mr. Kolb: She was like a public health nurse.
Mrs. Cole: No she was not, she was just a wonderful secretary, who was a manager as well, we promoted her to that, she was that good. And my job, I got out of the presidency. It was, it was well organized and I didn’t need to do that, so I became, my job was to go out in the county and find the people who didn’t come to the clinics, who didn’t come to the public health and didn’t even know what birth control was all about. So that was my job and I worked about six counties finally.
Mr. Kolb: Well how did you do that? I mean how do you find people that don’t come forward? I mean, do you go knocking on their doors?
Mrs. Cole: I don’t know. I think I took my cue from the, the wonderful man who did it for the blind, going to the people and talking to them and then we would say, well have you ever talked to Mrs. So-and-so?
Mr. Kolb: And you go and talk to groups, right?
Mrs. Cole: Yes. Well actually just houses, I would start in a little country house and I’d make friends with some of the people in the county and they said, well I’ll take you with me and then I would go to the schools and talk to the teachers and-
Mr. Kolb: So sort of a network.
Mrs. Cole: It was a network and then eventually we had about six people working in that committee, and I was in charge of it. And I loved it. I got to know so many people, wonderful people, lot of problems, lots of little children, very, very poor families, some prostitutes which had had many, many encounters with men and even persuaded a couple of them that it might be a good idea to have birth control. But the idea was not to persuade the idea was to make it someone else’s idea, because my work in college was in sociology and I think that kind of stuck with me, let the decision be something that comes at the arrival through information.
Mr. Kolb: It’s more lasting that way at least.
Mrs. Cole: Right, right. So that’s how I got to do it, and then I continued for almost, I’ll say 13 to 16 years, and then I got, it was called being out on a limb, where you get so your honored but not doing what you ought to do. So, well you know going out in the state and so forth, and I didn’t want to do that kind of work so I stopped. But I‘ve always been a proponent of it, and of course now, let’s see, it was mainly Oak Ridge that was supporting it, and then we got Knoxville to do it, and then they became modestly interested, I’ll put it that way, and now it’s spread to Nashville, which is the headquarters now.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, for the state?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anything like United Way funding back then at any time?
Mrs. Cole: Yes but we got pushed out, you know, after a while and that was terrible, because of abortions, so, and we got in the midst of all that, so.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I remember that.
Mrs. Cole: We lost a, I think, a $100,000 grant or something because of that. Well I thought they should have hid the doctor in another room and said no we don’t have a doctor at this site, but nobody believed me. I thought it could have been done that way.
Mr. Kolb: Well it was an important, important activity that did pay off, that’s for sure. I’m sure a lot of women would thank their lucky stars that they met you or others, but-
Mrs. Cole: I don’t know, I think it was a, we, in my mind at least what I did was to give them at their mind to decide what they wanted to do. But I worked with some young people, just, with the Anderson County Health Council, who felt freedom of choice was very important, but there was one group of young teenagers who’d all had babies, and I think Virginia Coleman was important to this sort of grant that we got that helped the young people decide how to take care of their babies and incidentally to learn that there was birth control, which Anderson County Health Council, don’t put that in your thing, they didn’t approve of.
Mr. Kolb: Oh they didn’t.
Mrs. Cole: No.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that was not generally accepted back then I guess.
Mrs. Cole: I was, well, it's not that long ago. It was before Tom got his stroke. It wasn't, I mean, I stopped being on the Anderson County Health Council.
Mr. Kolb: Were you on the Health Council then?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, well I got back into it a little bit. There was no planned parenthood at that point around here, so that’s what I did, and I was interested in it, but I found it was very anti-abortion, therefore, quote, I don’t know what, and at that point Tom got ill and so I just didn’t do it anymore.
Mr. Kolb: I think you mentioned earlier that, did your parents live with you when they were elderly?
Mrs. Cole: My father was dying when he came to Oak Ridge and he came with my mother and we all lived together. We moved to this house from the B-house right next door because I was having a baby and we were entitled to three bedrooms and when my mother and father came they took the bedroom that Tom and I have with the bath, and it was no stopping because I was having this baby and it was born the day before Christmas, no it was the day of Christmas night.
Mr. Kolb: Christmas Eve night okay.
Mrs. Cole: No Christmas night.
Mr. Kolb: Christmas night okay, okay, it was a Christmas baby.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, that was Ted, the middle son, and my father died with my little baby in his arms in a bedroom here at that house a few months later. He had emphysema and I won’t go into that.
Mr. Kolb: And your mother stayed with you?
Mrs. Cole: Mother stayed with us, and my sister was up in Boston area, and so she would go up there to see them but mother began to have what we call Alzheimer’s today, and I’ve always been petrified that I would have it and if I’m making mistakes now, it seems like I’m getting it, tell me. It’s a terrible thing but we found a wonderful place to take her. It was a very, very hard time in our lives, because the children were four and eight at that time, and I found a very wonderful place out in Concord, the Little Creek Sanitarium, and mother loved it and she died there very quickly of a heart attack, but it was a blessing at the time, 'cause she didn’t have to go through the hard part. So that was, so then I lost my parents and then this house was just us with the children.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, well that was plenty, with three little, three boys, it was very, very active I’m sure. Okay.
Mrs. Cole: But Peter didn’t come till fourteen years later so it was-
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know, it was quite a spread there, yeah.
Mrs. Cole: The only one I planned for, always said to Maryann, and Maryann too, actually, she and I both had little babies, and we, people would say, "My goodness you're showing off that you're planned parenthood people and you're both having babies. How could you do that?" Well Maryann said, "These are the first ones we’ve planned." No, I think I said that. I don’t know about Maryann.
Mr. Kolb: You got around to planning eventually here, here’s one that’s planned.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I found out how to, yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: When you're young you don’t have to plan, you want children so they just happen and everything's normal, yeah, that's right.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Jean, I know you’re a happy Oak Ridger, but what do you think makes, or did make Oak Ridge a unique community? Would you agree with me that it’s a unique community?
Mrs. Cole: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I don’t want to put words in you mouth, but.
Mrs. Cole: I lived in Winter Park, Florida for a while, I formally lived in a Hudson River town called Poughkeepsie in New York, but my second home was in Winter Park, Florida, and where I grew up, when I was, I was fourteen when we went there and I thought that was a wonderful city in Florida, and my mother became part of it. Coming up here, this was like, it was like home almost immediately, you know, it was a very close and yet vigorous town, lots of interesting people living next door to such a wonderful family as the Arnold’s and Elizabeth Arnold got her degree from, in French, actually, from the Sorbonne, and just a wonderful, wonderful person, and we were very close friends, and then I still miss many of the people who have had to leave or have died, because they were so, we were so close. And I just had been involved with a friend of mine whose husband just died and she said to me, “I had no idea how many wonderful friends I have, because they’re always there for me.”
Mr. Kolb: You took them for granted.
Mrs. Cole: Yes, it’s kind of an encompassing community if you do a lot of things, if you remain just only going to a church and that’s your life, that’s fine. That becomes that community. But those of us who have lived here quite a long time are pretty much involved with the whole community. The orchestra means so much-
Mr. Kolb: Right, right, yeah, Playhouse.
Mrs. Cole: The Art Center, the Playhouse and each one, I used to, when I was in college, I was in plays, and I used to love it, and, you know, all of these things sort of come together and help problems, community, outer community, the counties around us, being a Tennessean. That’s a whole new word for somebody who came from somewhere else, right?
Mr. Kolb: Right, exactly.
Mrs. Cole: So I think that we’re very lucky here and then you keep meeting new people and then you introduce them to the community so I think we are very, very fortunate and really very wonderful to have Oak Ridge National Lab here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yes.
Mrs. Cole: K-25 certainly was a hub, but that of course has changed now, but the lab is still continuing and I guess according to what I hear, and actually I went out there the other day.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you did?
Mrs. Cole: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, what was the occasion?
Mrs. Cole: We had done a mural from the, from the Art Center, Jane Larson and her crew and my crew went out there, and it was a wonderful thing.
Mr. Kolb: Is that in the entrance to the main lab?
Mrs. Cole: Exactly, it's inside not outside. And we did a fall, what I'd call, a fall one. Jane knew the women whose husband was one the directors for the lab, I guess. I don’t think it was Wadsworth but I don’t remember the other guy's name, but he’s there. Anyway his wife was a good friend of hers, and, oh, I think they lived in Washington before that, and she wanted Jane to do this and the lab became interested and that’s how we got involved with, the last one I guess we’ll do with Jane here, because she was getting pretty tired and had to sit down a lot, don’t quote me on that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that's okay.
Mrs. Cole: But we had a very enthusiastic group of people that helped put that together, and then we did, all the glazing and the firing was done in Oak Ridge with an oxidation fire. All the ones I did with Jane were reduction fire, and Tom and I literally took the one that’s on the outside of the Art Center and took it up to Washington to Jane so she could fire it in the reduction kiln. How we did it without breaking a single tile, I’ll never know. And Jane and I did a lot of the painting up there because she had certain glazes that we didn’t have in Oak Ridge and so, it's, you can tell very much about that, the one at the Art Center is a good example of the kind of glazing that we did, and I did a lot with it, and I loved it. But my glazing is on pots and-
Mr. Kolb: Smaller objects.
Mrs. Cole: Or they could be quite big like Nefertiti Chicken over there. That’s Nefertiti. She’s a chicken, though, and lots of humorous things that I like to do with, I guess you can tell that I love to cook things in there that are in my mind. I’ve got a group of pots downstairs with, that I call “All At Sea” and it's all with animals in a row boat, and the pig is protesting to the elephant that’s at the other end cause they don’t know which is the, whether they're going forward or backward.
Mr. Kolb: Like which ends is up, which way are we going?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, and they’re all wearing, some are wearing crowns and others are wearing funny hats and so forth.
Mr. Kolb: Getting the row together is progress.
Mrs. Cole: Yeah. I’ve just gotten my clay fixed again after Tom’s death. I haven’t been able to use it, and now I’m ready to do some more.
Mr. Kolb: Your kiln?
Mrs. Cole: My kiln is okay. It was the clay that was clogged up, so I couldn’t use it. I had a big, it’s called a de-airing machine, it’s mechanical, like, fired, and it was all, all the clay was absolutely nothing but one huge rock inside.
Mr. Kolb: They all dried out basically?
Mrs. Cole: Right.
Mr. Kolb: So you have to get new clay that way or-
Mrs. Cole: No, I made it work.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Cole: Don’t ask me why, anyway, so that’s happening again in my life and I’m just about ready to do it.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Cole: So let’s see what else about Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well the people that you had, came in contact with from all over the world basically, it's just amazing how, a big melting pot here.
Mrs. Cole: I was going to say we are very lucky. I hiked with Mr. Wigner.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, Eugene Wigner?
Mrs. Cole: Yeah, with Jack and Maryann Gibbons, as a matter of fact. They had him up in the county to hike with us. I was able to see him. I saw quite a few, and when we went to the conference in Geneva, we were involved in that, and then we have a lot of French friends over there so I still have, they used to be here in Oak Ridge and then they’ve gone back to France or to Geneva and so they’re still my friends and I’m going over there in August to see a couple of them.
Mr. Kolb: Great that’s wonderful.
Mrs. Cole: And my children said, "You're going alone, Mother?" And I said, "Why not?" I’m going to Geneva and I think they’ll pick me up. So that’s just an aside.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s good. I’m glad you have maintained those contacts, that’s important.
Mrs. Cole: But in terms of Oak Ridge, I think there was almost nothing you couldn't suggest for an organization. If you look at the organization chapter that came to us a couple of days ago at all the organizations, it’s quite incredible.
Mr. Kolb: It is, everything going for a town this size.
Mrs. Cole: And you can’t say how lonesome we get. You didn’t cry, and look what ORCMA has done for us.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ORCMA is wonderful, and ORICLE.
Mrs. Cole: I mean ORICLE, yeah, ORCMA as well, and the Playhouse, and so forth.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, when we go on trips and we talk about ORICLE to people, and they say, they’re just amazed, you know. Well we have our university. Well the university does that too, but we have it right here in our little local town, you know.
Mrs. Cole: And Roane State, isn’t that a great deal to us? Elizabeth Arnold worked very hard to get a different kind of college here. And they had actually compiled some money for it to make it work, and in the end they gave it to Roane State.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah that’s been very successful and-
Mrs. Cole: I think we did the right thing actually. She was looking for a more intellectual college, and I think, in our area here, this has meant so much, especially if you go over to Roane State, the main campus, it’s wonderful over in the Kingston area, Rockwood, so I think we’ve gained a great deal as well as giving a good bit. So I think that’s one of the good things in life, isn't it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and it draws people of the community, from the outside community into Oak Ridge, too, and makes them more involved too, I think, yeah. Okay, well listen, I think we’ve touched all the bases that I had on my list. This has been wonderful, Jean.
Mrs. Cole: Well, I’m sorry to, I wanted to tell you something and you can turn it off, but I, I just read this-
[end of recording]
transcribed: Jan 2005
typed by: lb
reviewed: Jan 2010
edited by: amhb